San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
U.N.: VOWS TO CUT EMISSIONS TOO MEAGER TO HALT CLIMATE CHANGE
Analysis finds bigger efforts are needed to curb global warming
Pledges made so far by countries around the globe to cut greenhouse gas emissions fall strikingly short of the profound changes necessary to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change, the United Nations said on Friday.
The U.N. analysis comes as presidents and prime ministers face pressure to ramp up the promises they made as part of the Paris climate accord in 2015. Through the end of last year, roughly 75 countries representing about 30 percent of global emissions had updated their initial plans ahead of a key U.N. climate summit this fall in Scotland.
But so far, U.N. officials reported Friday, those more ambitious pledges are hardly ambitious enough. Even if countries follow through, their combined impacts would put the world on a path to achieve only a 1 percent reduction in global emissions by 2030, compared to 2010 levels. By contrast, scientists have said that emissions must fall by nearly 50 percent this decade for the world to realistically have a shot at avoiding devastating temperature rise.
“Current levels of climate ambition are very far from putting us on a pathway that will meet our Paris agreement goals,” said Patricia Espinosa, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. “While we acknowledge the recent political shift in momentum towards stronger climate action throughout the world, decisions to accelerate and broaden climate action everywhere must be taken now.”
Only two of the world’s 18 largest emitters — the European Union and the United Kingdom — submitted plans with substantially bolder emissions-cutting plans in 2020. So far, they are the exception among the globe’s biggest carbon polluters.
“One thing that gets lost in this report’s top-line findings is the deeply encouraging news that a number of countries put forward really bold climate targets last year, such as Colombia, Argentina, the United Kingdom and the European Union,” Helen Mountford, vice president for climate and economics at the World Resources Institute, said in a statement.
“The problem is that those taking ambitious action are being overshadowed by a few countries that are lagging behind like Brazil and Mexico, which put forward new plans that have even weaker targets than what they put forward five years ago, and Australia and Russia, which did not strengthen their efforts at all. These laggards must stop fiddling while the world burns.”
China, the world’s largest emitter, has a developing economy that relies heavily on coal-burning power plants. The Chinese have no plans to begin scaling back their pollution until emissions levels peak around 2030. They have said they expect to stop adding to the global warming problem by 2060.
The U.S., the world’s second-biggest emitter, only just rejoined the Paris accord. President Joe Biden has made clear that he wants to put the country on a path decarbonize the electricity sector by 2035, and to eliminate the nation’s carbon footprint 15 years after that.
“Nothing less than bold action in this decade can set the entire world on the path that we have confidence will get to net-zero emissions by 2050 — or earlier,” Biden’s climate envoy, John Kerry, told the U.N. Security Council last week, adding, “For those that argue that climate action is just too expensive, study after study confirms that now at this this moment in our history, inaction comes with a far higher price tag than action.”
The U.N. analysis on Friday echoed the findings of another report from earlier this month, which found that the current national pledges to cut emissions are woefully weak. Even if countries were to meet their existing pledges, that study found, the world has only about a 5 percent chance to limit the Earth’s warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) over preindustrial levels — a key aim of the international agreement.
Adrian Raftery, a University of Washington statistics professor and co-author of the study, and a colleague calculated that global emissions would need to fall steadily — about 1.8 percent each year on average — to put the world on a more sustainable trajectory.